TIL about 'Side B' LGBTQ Christians

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I’d almost literally rather die than have a conversation about this topic with other frequenters of the Atlas Forum Religion & Philosophy board (ETA: other than to observe that "Side B" is a stupid, stupid phrase, as is its affirming equivalent, "Side A"), but I’m going to take the opportunity to share this fascinating semi-relevant article about the midcentury gay Catholic poet Dunstan Thompson.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I’d almost literally rather die than have a conversation about this topic with other frequenters of the Atlas Forum Religion & Philosophy board (other than to observe that "Side B" is a stupid, stupid phrase), but I’m going to take the opportunity to share this fascinating semi-relevant article about the midcentury gay Catholic poet Dunstan Thompson.

It's a good article. I know Catholic guilt. Art forged through inner conflict or turmoil is often the most praised, the most beautiful, critically dissected and at times the most commercial. But I've never felt comfortable with that. It's not a place a person should find themselves; perhaps it's why there's nothing quite like what 'was', because what's 'now' is created in less conflicted times. Some would argue that real 'art' can't exist without conflict. But resolving conflict, living life without it and being direct produces art I connect with;

Frank O'Hara;

'I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick

which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism

just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me.'

I couldn't agree more; I love O'Hara, and while I think guilt and inner conflict are great subjects for art I don't think they're the only ones. Resolution and deciding to put one's demons to rest (or try to) are wonderful subjects too; there's a reason why some of Van Gogh's best paintings are portraits of psychiatrists who were treating him. I remember from a conversation you and I had years and years ago that you strongly dislike Tolkien, but I hope you'll see the appeal in "At the End of the Quest, Victory", the title of W.H. Auden's NYT review of The Return of the King. The response to psychic conflict should involve at least an attempt at genuine resolution (of which, oddly, the actual ending of The Return of the King is not a good example).

I don't mean to monopolize this thread if you and others want to discuss the topic of the "Side B" phenomenon on its merits, though, so I'll set this conversation aside for now.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I’d almost literally rather die than have a conversation about this topic with other frequenters of the Atlas Forum Religion & Philosophy board (other than to observe that "Side B" is a stupid, stupid phrase), but I’m going to take the opportunity to share this fascinating semi-relevant article about the midcentury gay Catholic poet Dunstan Thompson.

It's a good article. I know Catholic guilt. Art forged through inner conflict or turmoil is often the most praised, the most beautiful, critically dissected and at times the most commercial. But I've never felt comfortable with that. It's not a place a person should find themselves; perhaps it's why there's nothing quite like what 'was', because what's 'now' is created in less conflicted times. Some would argue that real 'art' can't exist without conflict. But resolving conflict, living life without it and being direct produces art I connect with;

Frank O'Hara;

'I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick

which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism

just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me.'

I couldn't agree more; I love O'Hara, and while I think guilt and inner conflict are great subjects for art I don't think they're the only ones. Resolution and deciding to put one's demons to rest (or try to) are wonderful subjects too; there's a reason why some of Van Gogh's best paintings are portraits of psychiatrists who were treating him. I remember from a conversation you and I had years and years ago that you strongly dislike Tolkien, but I hope you'll see the appeal in "At the End of the Quest, Victory", the title of W.H. Auden's NYT review of The Return of the King. The response to psychic conflict should involve at least an attempt at genuine resolution (of which, oddly, the actual ending of The Return of the King is not a good example).

I don't mean to monopolize this thread if you and others want to discuss the topic of the "Side B" phenomenon on its merits, though, so I'll set this conversation aside for now.

All conversation is good conversation

I'm not a fan of Tolkien on reflection I think not because of his writings which are fine, but the archetypes he created which overwhelmed the fantasy genre for decades, and even overwhelmed his own (I like Tom Bombadil for the reasons people tend not to; it's more rooted in classic English fantasy) But I'm a Gaiman fan so I'm biased. I can almost forgive his imperialism for the same reason I can forgive Herge who I adore (though Herge made greater, revisionary moves to atone for it.), and for all the criticisms of women in his writings, you'd struggle to see much advance from that in fiction today tbh. I'm looking forward to the adaptation of His Dark Materials which I think is probably the finest, popular inversion of the trope.

On reading Auden's review, he is correct in saying that wars are won by the strong not the just and that good cannot impose itself by force or else it ceases to be good and overall I think he is fair in his assessment in how to resolve that 'black and white' straightjacket that these sorts of hero's journey's find themselves in. I do think that conflict has to be resolved and I think that art is only at it's most complete reflection of the self when it does. The conclusion must always be, in some way, anticlimactic. Even if it's death before resolution or death to evade it.

Michael Moorcock, who you probably know of, was to science fiction as I suppose Tolkien is to fantasy (making it less pew pew go rocket go and more desolate) and he's still kicking around. I agree when he says that Tolkien, like other orthodox writers is someone who 'substituted faith for artistic vigour' seeing the working class as a 'bulwark against chaos'...as long as everything goes back the way it was. Which of course, when Tolkien was writing LoTR, it hadn't. Tolkien, Lewis etc are, as he puts it rightly 'High Tories.' I often find it uncomfortable that in latter years, there's a glut (usually your side of the pond) of both apologists and detractors trying to read J E S U S too much into Tolkien and Lewis. I think it's the wrong lens. They were Jordan Petersoning to the young men in their bedrooms and common rooms.

The best summation of my discomfort with LoTR comes from Moorcock;

'The Lord of the Rings is a pernicious confirmation of the values of   a declining   nation with a morally bankrupt class whose cowardly self-protection is primarily responsible for the problems England answered with the ruthless logic of Thatcherism. Humanity was derided and marginalised.'

Though he saves his venom, somewhat rightly, for Lewis

These are all good observations and I'd almost go so far as to say that I think they're the "correct" reasons to dislike Tolkien if one is to dislike him; attacks on Tolkien's writing qua writing more often than not come from places of surprisingly intense elitism and genre-ghettoization, whereas what he's using that writing to advocate is much easier to fairly criticize. Personally I don't think the racial undertones in Tolkien's writing can quite be described as "imperialism" exactly but I might feel differently about that if I were British and had grown up with the legacy of the British Empire.

My own reasons for liking Tolkien are largely down to 1. a history of personal engagement with his writing going back to my childhood, 2. agreement with many, but not all, of his spiritual focuses (expressed more in his letters than in his fiction imo), and 3. appreciation for a lot of what he does with, again, the externalization and dramatization of some of the forces within his psyche and the collective psyche of his social environment that Empire, the Great War, and the Industrial Revolution had unleashed. I don't necessarily love the fact that almost all later Western fantasy literature has either appropriated or reacted against this series of actually very spatially and temporally particular hobbyhorses, but I think a lot of what Tolkien himself does with this is artistically interesting despite its moral lapses.

Agreed on Tom Bombadil, btw.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Moorcock could probably have done with an editor.

He's revised it several times. I think it reads well and it was and still is quite an even handed shot across the bow. What people perhaps find unfair is that British fantasy fiction didn't generate proto-Tolkiens; we got Pratchett, Le Guin, Gaiman etc in the decades that followed who have faced 'well it's not exactly Tolkien is it' their entire professional careers. So perhaps people think it's just sour grapes when faced with a critique of an almost deified Tolkien and Lewis (which we also seem keen do for anyone elses literary output we deem as codified Great War angst) And as I said this doesn't come from within the genre; just the consumers of it, imitators of it and the screenwriters wanting EPIC SAGAS to make bank on.

Point of order: Le Guin was American; her parents were the Berkeley anthropologists A.L. and Theodora Kroeber.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Moorcock could probably have done with an editor.

He's revised it several times. I think it reads well and it was and still is quite an even handed shot across the bow. What people perhaps find unfair is that British fantasy fiction didn't generate proto-Tolkiens; we got Pratchett, Le Guin, Gaiman etc in the decades that followed who have faced 'well it's not exactly Tolkien is it' their entire professional careers. So perhaps people think it's just sour grapes when faced with a critique of an almost deified Tolkien and Lewis (which we also seem keen do for anyone elses literary output we deem as codified Great War angst) And as I said this doesn't come from within the genre; just the consumers of it, imitators of it and the screenwriters wanting EPIC SAGAS to make bank on.

Yeah, I read one of the more recent revisions (it cited Rowling positively, which struck me as interesting).

I've read it in less recent revisions, but this doesn't entirely surprise me to hear. The actual Harry Potter books, independent of Rowling's demonstrated inability to let them stand on their own and move on with her career, do feature treatments of death and oppression that, while neither depressing nor particularly sophisticated, are difficult to dismiss as mere conventional wisdom or as part of an attempt to resuscitate "traditional values".

I agree that the idea that LotR resolves in an entirely pat and affirmational way is a serious misreading of it; the earliest versions of "Epic Pooh" also predate the publication of the Silmarillion, which is a much bleaker and more discomfiting work than LotR (not that this necessarily makes it better).

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The sexual revolution led to misery and destruction. Check the divorce rates, std rates, and general statistics on happiness.

I'm not an uncritical cheerleader for the sexual revolution either, but there are pretty serious correlation/causation issues with this claim.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Why is there such a high suicide rate within the LGBT community?

I don't know, why do you think there is?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Stats
1 in 4 youth suicides is from LGBT

I'm aware. What I meant was, why do you think that's the case, since you're asking the rest of us why we think it's the case?